
AI Engineer at Acolad
Sept. 2025 - PresentAcolad is a global leader in language and content solutions, present in 25 countries. As an AI Engineer, I build Lia Live AI, Acolad's real-time AI interpreting platform, owning it end to end from applied speech research to production infrastructure.
- Build the real-time speech pipelines: streaming transcription, LLM translation and streaming voice synthesis, delivering interpreted speech in under a second across 80+ languages, in consecutive and simultaneous modes.
- Design the distributed backend behind live multilingual sessions: a stateless API, a session-affine engine running the audio pipelines and a gateway brokering every provider call, with admission control so stateful real-time sessions scale horizontally over WebRTC, telephony and WebSocket.
- Own the AI layer: config-driven routing across Deepgram, OpenAI, Gemini and Gradium, translation grounded in the running conversation and client glossaries, plus agentic features surfacing clarifications and cultural context.
- Build the evaluation framework that settles every model and provider choice, scoring quality and latency as a single metric against measured human-interpreter delay.
- Run the service in production: incident response, OpenTelemetry and Datadog observability, multi-tenant auth, GDPR-compliant erasure and billing with per-call cost attribution, plus the engineering platform behind it (ADR-driven design, LLM-powered code review in CI).
- Drive the platform's next generation: speech model fine-tuning, inference optimisation and on-device deployment.










